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What the American Revolution Owes the Rest of the World
New Republic • Feb 5, 2026

What the American Revolution Owes the Rest of the World

Perhaps the least commented upon feature of the dystopian Trump banners adorning parts of Washington D.C. is the red, white, and blue number—“250”—emblazoned just beneath the president’s Windsor-knotted tie. These ribbon-shaped digits are the emblem of the “America 250” campaign, a public-private enterprise established by Congress in 2016 to spearhead the celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States in 2026. The banners are thus part of what will likely be a long contest to shape (and profit from) the narrative around this round-number anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. This will not be a product of the government alone, of course—we haven’t arrived at that dystopia just yet—but will involve numerous editorials, books, documentaries, and public events.Richard Bell’s The American Revolution and the Fate of the World is one such entrant in this field, an entertaining history of the Revolution that encourages readers to see it as an event defined by “interdependence” as much as independence, a “creation story” not just for the United States but for “our modern world.” More successful in making this first point than the second, the book nevertheless provides—almost inadvertently—a good reminder of what made the Revolution distinctive, and why that distinctiveness deserves renewed attention at a time when some might otherwise use the memory of an anti-monarchial revolt to crown a new king.  A professor of history at the University of Maryland, Bell wants to challenge what he calls the “tightly blinkered” perspective on the Revolution found in “most basic textbook histories.” This narrative, he suggests, focuses too much on the “simple story of rebels versus redcoats,” obscuring the conflict’s true “transnational scope and complexity.” He proposes instead an account that includes not just the Founding Fathers and their Continental Congresses but also “Black American freedom seekers … Chinese tea-pickers, Mohawk warriors, Sierra Leonian separatists … [and] Asian rulers.” The American Revolution, he argues, cannot be understood as merely an “American” event. Bell does not reject the traditional story of the Revolution—what we might call the Schoolhouse Rock tale of American “Patriots” shouting, “No more kings.” But, he argues, it must be seen as a global upheaval, one that began because British trade policy in China triggered a civil war in North America, launching a global war for empire that reached from the Caribbean to India, leading slaves to take arms against their masters and tens of thousands to flee across continents and oceans.Bell starts with the traditional sequence of revolutionary-era events—the Boston Tea Party, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, etc.—but he shows how they fit into Britain’s tea trade with China. Seeking to maintain commercial advantages in China and India, London wanted the colonists to buy only British-shipped tea (and not the cheaper, smuggled Dutch tea they preferred). The colonists resented the implication that their economic choices should be subservient to Britain’s. Trade, money, and tea prices were the initial sticking point, not the existence of the monarchy. And by shifting the focus in this way, Bell reveals how the American Revolution was initially more about economic policy than monarchial power or political rights.From there, Bell largely leaves behind the familiar story, touring instead the global landscape that shaped, and was shaped by, the better-known events in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. The kingdoms of France and Spain, he proposes, did as much to deliver victory for the colonists as the would-be republicans in the Continental Army. French troops and ships provided the bulk of the military power behind the climactic rebel victory at Yorktown in 1781. Spanish military aid, in turn, helped keep colonial troops in the field. Many rebel guns at Lexington and Concord, it turns out, literally bore the mark of Spain’s King Carlos III, sent from then-Spanish New Orleans—while Carlos’s soldiers made their impression, as well. Almost entirely forgotten Spanish campaigns along the Gulf Coast dragged London into yet another theater of war, forcing the surrender of British Florida and dramatically escalating the costs of the conflict in the months before the British collapse in Virginia.  The kingdoms of France and Spain, he proposes, did as much to deliver victory for the colonists as the would-be republicans in the Continental Army. Still more disruptive to the traditional narrative of white Continentals fighting their white British cousins are Bell’s accounts of lesser-known figures, like Molly Brant, an influential Mohawk woman married to a British diplomat, and Harry Washington, an enslaved West African man who fled George Washington’s plantation to join the British war effort against his former master. Brant’s struggles to maintain an anti-Patriot alliance between the Iroquois Confederacy and the British illustrates well how the Revolutionary War was no mere contest among Europeans. Native leaders like Brant saw the conflict as a chance to partner with the British Crown to reassert their own sovereignty against colonial encroachment. A brutal fight for the interior resulted, culminating in a horrific scorched-earth campaign against the Iroquois in upstate New York (ordered by General Washington), forcing Brant to flee to Canada. Harry Washington’s life, meanwhile, reveals another forgotten aspect of Washington’s war against Britain—that it precipitated one of the largest slave rebellions in American history, as more than 25 thousand Black people fled to British lines, many taking up arms for the king. After fighting up and down the East Coast, Harry was among the handful of former slaves evacuated by British forces after Yorktown. He eventually settled in Sierra Leone, part of a new wave of European-backed imperialism in Africa. He and his compatriots were not alone in being forced to settle across the sea, either; the Revolution scattered populations across the globe, white and Black alike. White “Loyalists” to the Crown fled north to further populate British Canada, while numerous British convicts previously destined for hard labor in North America were instead transported by the British to yet another new colony, this time in Australia. As these displacements suggest, what might surprise readers of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World the most is what that fate was: more empire and more inequality. Harry Washington for one would disappear from the historical record after participating in his own anti-British revolt, this by the Black residents of Freetown against the tyranny of the London-backed Sierra Leone Company in 1800. Two years earlier in Ireland, the British had also brutally cracked down on the “United Irishmen,” largely Protestant Irish nationalists inspired by the example of the United States to try to throw off the king’s yoke. In India, Haidar Ali—the leader of the independent kingdom of Mysore—used the opportunity opened by colonists to strike against growing British power on the subcontinent. Allying with the French and Dutch, Haidar won a number of battles across southern India before dying of cancer in 1782. Though his son, Tipu Sultan, maintained the war for a time, the British eventually turned the tide, conquering Mysore and further securing their dominant position in South Asia. The new United States also made its own imperial moves as a result of the Revolution, using its victory over pro-British Native Americans to further expand frontier settlement in North America, absorbing once-sovereign Indigenous nations into its own burgeoning continental empire.What clearly emerges from these stories is an American Revolution that, as Bell rightly argues, cannot be fully contained within national borders or traditional narratives, an event that occurred across a much broader and already startlingly integrated world, one bound together by globalized networks of trade, migration, and power that spanned from Philadelphia and London to Freetown and Madras. Bell’s work will no doubt help many readers understand the Revolution more completely than they had before. Yet it’s hard not to think that most will also close the book feeling a bit dissatisfied, as if Bell starts his narrative too late and ends it too early. This is because, from a global perspective at least, Bell enters and exits the story in the middle. France and Spain did not go to war with Britain because of the American colonists, they went to war because the colonists provided an opportunity to do what France and Spain had long been doing: waging war for empire. The Revolution appeared to offer a chance to wrest control of the international system from an increasingly dominant Britain. Both had fought Britain before and would fight again before the century was out. The same can be said for Haidar Ali—an aggressive statesman with a strong military, he fought, as he would have anyway, to defeat the British threat to his own independence. The colonists gave him an opportunity, not a reason. Harry Washington, meanwhile, may only have ended up in Sierra Leone because of American independence, but that’s certainly not the sole reason Britain expanded its reach in West Africa. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Europeans not attempting to colonize Australia at some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, regardless of whether the British government found itself in need of a new escape valve for its penal system. The American Revolution also did not begin the expansion of empire in North America—or the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans—that was already well underway. The Revolution disrupted empires, economies, and lives, but it didn’t really threaten the world order based on expanding white European power; in many ways it reinforced it.While it’s inarguably a significant moment in world history, Bell’s claim that the American Revolution offers an origin story for the modern world—that it was an event that threw “much of the established world order into chaos”—thus seems too strong. Indeed, the very global perspective he advocates for undercuts such claims. When it comes to the broad sweep of global history that produced the present, the Revolution was more consequence than cause, a by-product of what was actually throwing the planet into chaos in the eighteenth century: European imperialism and the violent form of globalization it was forcing on the world. In the long run, American independence did little to disrupt that process or alter geopolitical outcomes for those living in non-European spaces like Mysore, Sierra Leone, China, or—in the near term at least—in Latin America. Even for Native Americans, the difference is less significant than we might think. It’s difficult to imagine a victorious post-Revolutionary British government truly restraining further white settlement of North America, while British Canada itself hardly proved a much better protector of Indigenous rights than the United States. The Revolution disrupted empires, economies, and lives, but it didn’t really threaten the world order based on expanding white European power; in many ways it reinforced it. If we want to claim singular importance for the American Revolution, in fact, it can really only be done by keeping a steady eye on the very Schoolhouse Rock “no more Kings” version of the story that Bell deliberately moves away from. Though in a much more limited way than mythologized renderings of American history tend to suggest, the Revolution’s liberal rhetoric of freedom and representation did inject new strength into an emerging discourse about political rights, one that within a few generations would produce a novel mass democracy in the United States. Though horribly limited by race and gender, that democracy, and the discourse of freedom it helped maintain, offered a foundation on which many of the more decent aspects of modernity are at least partly built. The American Revolution and the Fate of the World mentions this—reminding readers that the Patriots’ “call to liberty would push questions about human rights, citizenship, and sovereignty toward the top of the global agenda for the first time”—but that point is lost amid the book’s whirl of global stories. Bell is right to suggest that liberal ideas were far less important to the colonial cause than most Americans like to believe, but they were also among the few things produced by the Revolution that truly disrupted the empire-dominated world order of the late eighteenth century. The new United States, after all, did anything but. Bell’s version of the American Revolution is neither satisfyingly global enough (which would require more attention to the history of European imperial expansion) nor American enough (which would require more rebels, redcoats, and battle cries of freedom).This dichotomy of empire and freedom in American history is important to remember as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year. Though many in and out of the government will try to say otherwise, what is uniquely worth celebrating about the American Revolution is not so much the United States it created—which, in many respects, became just another empire in a long list of empires extending back to antiquity. It’s instead the boost the colonists gave to another equally ancient phenomenon: the impulse to pull down the banners of kings. People should read Bell’s book, certainly, but it also wouldn’t hurt to watch a little Schoolhouse Rock too.

First, They Came for Your Elections. Then, Your Guns.
New Republic • Feb 5, 2026

First, They Came for Your Elections. Then, Your Guns.

“I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it,” President Trump said on Tuesday. He then cited Detroit, Philadelphia, adding, “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the vote. If they can’t count the vote legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.” His comments came a day after he told podcaster Dan Bongino, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”Trump’s remarks are fundamentally at odds with the Constitution. The elections clause grants states the right to decide the “times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives,” and assigns oversight exclusively to Congress; and the Tenth Amendment enshrines the principle of federalism—that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But Trump has never shown much fealty to, let alone understanding of, the Constitution.Some might therefore dismiss Trump’s rhetoric as an idle threat or perhaps the rantings of an aging madman. But we cannot dismiss it. The threat is real, as evidenced by Monday’s news that Trump personally oversaw an FBI raid of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, where agents seized “truckloads” of ballots, along with voter rolls and scanned images. Trump’s DOJ has also demanded voter roll information from 44 states and the District of Columbia, including driver’s license and Social Security data, and has initiated lawsuits against 24 districts when they refused to comply.   Beyond the immediate concern that Trump intends to interfere in upcoming national elections, his comments and actions are a stark departure from previous Republican positions on states’ rights. Just a decade ago, when Trump first sought the presidency, the Republican Party platform included complaints against the Obama administration for “bullying of state and local governments.” It declared allegiance to the notion of states’ rights by asserting that “every violation of state sovereignty by federal officials is not merely a transgression of one unit of government against another; it is an assault on the liberties of individual Americans.” And Trump himself stated in 2016 that “many, many things actually should be states’ rights.” He said he was willing to leave issues involving transgender Americans and abortion to the states, and promised to “make states the laboratories of democracy once again.” Yet the notion of states’ rights has gone the way of the wind as Trump has remade the GOP in his authoritarian image and sought to massively expand his executive power. Now he’s deemed states’ rights rather inconvenient to his maximalist goals. Thus, the administration has attacked the rights of cities and states to enact “sanctuary city” policies that limit cooperation with federal authorities enforcing Trump’s draconian immigration policies. Trump has issued executive orders targeting states’ own climate laws, despite the fact that, as attorney David Doniger of the National Resources Defense Council puts it, “the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld state authority to enact and enforce such laws from the early 19th century to the present day.”After the murder of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection officer, the president told reporters, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns.” And on Monday, Trump’s sycophantic U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, stated to Fox News that anyone who brings a firearm into the city can expect to go to jail. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.” Trump and his MAGA underlings have decided, in other words, that the Second Amendment—long an inviolable part of Republican orthodoxy—does not apply to anti-ICE protesters. This has dismayed not only guns rights groups but even some Republican lawmakers. “Why is a ‘conservative’ judge threatening to arrest gun owners?” Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky asked on X. Representative Greg Steube of Florida tweeted at Pirro, “I bring a gun into the district every week.... I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others.” Of course, they were in the minority: Most Republicans have remained silent, tacitly acknowledging that they don’t have absolutist positions on gun rights and states’ rights after all.Some might counter that Democrats at times have also violated or wrongfully disregarded states’ rights. This was the contention of the Supreme Court in 2022 when it struck down an Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency regulation that a majority of the justices said went too far in imposing federal carbon emissions standards on states without congressional approval. The Biden administration was also accused of violating states’ rights to craft their own policies around Covid treatment and prevention. In both cases, however, the federal government was motivated by the desire to protect the health and welfare of the people, and can be said to have been acting in the public’s best interests. These were areas of legitimate legal dispute, not pure power grabs as we’re seeing from the Trump administration. Moreover, these were national policies that applied to all states equally—not directed at specific states for political reasons. The same cannot be said of the Trump administration. It has questioned billions of dollars of federal funding going to 14 blue states and the District of Columbia, and has frozen funding for childcare in five Democratic-led states. Trump’s retributive intentions are hardly subtle: Unlawfully yanking away $7 billion of funding for clean energy products, his officials practically boasted of their motivations to a federal judge, who noted that they “freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily—if not exclusively—based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024.”None of these actions show a particular regard for states’ rights to make decisions for their own people. Yet asserting that Trump has changed his position on federalism would imply that he had a position on the issue in the first place. Trump, as we know, reverses his position on issues—constitutional and otherwise—whenever it suits him. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, he declared that he had “absolute power” to determine and enforce policies. But two days later, after pushback from Republican governors, he decided that he was a states’ rights guy after all, telling the governors, “You are all very capable people, I think in all cases, very capable people. And you’re going to be calling your shots.” And in his policymaking, Trump has staked out obviously contradictory positions on federalism. He has simultaneously argued that the federal government has no right to tell states to limit coal production and carbon pollution, yet somehow he does have the authority to tell blue states that they cannot set their own emission standards. Trump, then, only cares about states’ rights when it serves his political or policy purposes. But by and large, during his second term, Trump has shown little regard for states’ rights and sovereignty. There’s no clearer example of this than his militarization of American cities. There is no more telling signal of governmental overreach than heavily armed, unidentifiable goon squads roaming American streets and terrorizing towns. Even now, after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Trump has refused to back down and allow states to police their own streets, stating that there will be no pullback in Minnesota. It’s the rare issue where he’s been consistent: He didn’t care about states’ rights, either, when he sent troops into Los Angeles, violating the Posse Comitatus Act, or when he federalized D.C.’s police force. Meanwhile, Republicans, once the party of states’ rights, have barely made a peep about Trump’s destruction of a once-sanctified GOP principle. Their timid acceptance proves what liberals have long argued to be true: States’ rights was always just a sham excuse for the party to ignore national laws, including those enshrined in or protected by the Constitution, that it disagreed with. Now, states’ rights are largely a hindrance to MAGA’s plans—in particular the weaponization of the federal government against Trump’s perceived enemies, whether it be immigrants, protesters, or entire states that voted against him. And so the principle of federalism becomes just more collateral damage by the fascist regime.

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